I M M O B I L I S M | a labor of love lost and found (2010-2020)

I wrote these words a long time ago.

With its administrative upgrade in 1888, Beirut became the capital a territory “extending from Lataqiya in the north to Naplus to the south” (Kassir, 2010: 95), an area much larger than the State of Greater Lebanon that was to come in 1920, under the French Mandate.

In other words, the amount of public attention that infrastructure receives — through state campaigns, or the activism of civil society organisations, for example — can also be seen as another form of “biased struggles for social, economic, ecological and political power” (Graham and Marvin, 2001: 11) inherent to the planning process.',

Kassir (2010) writes: “Whereas before the Great War there had been only a half-dozen cars in Beirut, and the government itself owned only five cars in 1920, there were no fewer than 376 motor vehicles in the following year. The first drivers’ licenses were issued in 1921…In the space of two years, the number of cars registered in Lebanon tripled; in 1928 there were 5,291 and then almost 10,000 in 1932” (p. 303).

I wrote these words in secret, after dark, a long time ago. I hesitated when writing these words.